November 17, 2010

By the way, the ones who made the attack were the Pharisees. It’s always those people coming and saying, “But, your disciples, what are they doing?” Jesus says, “They’re hungry.” And please let me have a little liberty. He didn’t say this, but in essence, “I’m the Lord of the rules.” He let them do it. So now if we’re going to talk about keeping the sabbath, Jesus broke that one right there. And He did it not just in one place; He did it in many places. And He healed a woman, same thing. We have that passage about healing a woman that occurs on the sabbath. That’s just one example. How about: Honor your mother and father? Jesus turns around and says, “Well, who are they?” I mean, think about it in context. You cannot look at and separate the Old from the New Testament and say, “Well I read and study the Ten Commandments as an example. And that is my fishing license,” without understanding that God put this beautiful tapestry in the Old Testament to then unfold it, so it would be there and Christ would be revealed; as we always say, the Law has been fulfilled in Christ. Truly He had to come and take that barrier away for us for a Law that we could never live up to anyway. He fulfilled it.

Pastor Melissa Scott tells us that we can go through just taking the Ten Commandments, but that’s not the whole Law; that’s just the Ten Commandments. But there are the laws between man and man and the laws between God and man. And if you take them all into consideration, you understand Jesus fulfills both sides of the equation because He was all man and all God, both… in the God-man, fulfilling both.

We have for example adultery. What did He do when the woman was taken in adultery, in the very act? The Law says she should be stoned. What does He say to her? “Go and sin no more.” He literally broke the commandments. He was entitled to. That second set of tablets that were put in the Ark (representing Christ) which, in that type of Christ, could only be put in Him. Go back to the Old Testament; the tablets unbroken… really and literally were put inside that Ark, which was Christ: everything in it typifying Christ could only be contained within Christ. That’s what was carried away, gone. Where is the Ark? We can get into speculation but it’s gone. We don’t have it.

My point is there will be people who because of their ignorance in God’s Word will condemn you for your food, condemn you for your drink, condemn you for being in a church where they don’t have a better this or a better that, or they’ll just sit in judgment of you, whatever it is.

The beauty is that this book of Galatians, the more I study it, and the more I reread it, the more I see God had to use a man so well versed in the Law, understanding it so clearly. He could not have picked anybody else except for this man who understood perfectly well that only Jesus could be the complete fulfillment of all of this.